10 journos caught fabricating

On Monday, The New Yorker’s Jonah Lehrer resigned from the magazine after admitting he fabricated quotes from Bob Dylan in his new book. Lehrer is hardly the first ink-stained wretch to get caught making stuff up. Here are 10 memorable cases:

1. Louis Seibold

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In 1921, New York World reporter Louis Seibold won a Pulitzer Prize for an interview he conducted with President Woodrow Wilson. The problem: Wilson was incapacitated due to a stroke, and the interview was faked with the help of the president’s wife and chief of staff.

2. Mike Barnicle

Now known for his frequent presence on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Barnicle was forced to resign from the Boston Globe in 1998 after plagiarizing the comedian George Carlin in a column. Barnicle had troubles dating back to 1973, when a court ruled Barnicle made up a quote and the Globe was forced to pay $40,000 in damages. In 1990, he quoted Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz as saying he likes Asian women because they’re “submissive.” The Globe paid $75,000 in a settlement after Dershowitz sued.

3. Carl Cameron

In 2004, Fox News apologized to Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) after Cameron falsely reported Kerry had received a manicure before a presidential debate. Cameron wrote a story posted to Fox’s website with made-up quotes from Kerry. “I’m metrosexual — he’s a cowboy!” the senator “said” in the story.

4. Jayson Blair

Blair resigned from The New York Times in 2002 after it was discovered he had lifted material from other papers, invented scenes and filed stories from places he had never been. Dozens of Blair’s stories contained such problems, including reports about the Washington sniper shootings and wounded Iraq war veterans.

5. Christopher Newton

Newton, a reporter for The Associated Press, was fired in 2002 after the wire service discovered he made up sources for at least 40 of his stories. Most of the fictional sources were supposed subject-matter experts, and worked at real-sounding organizations like the “Education Alliance,” “Voice for the Disabled” and the “Western Alliance For Immigration Rights.”

6. Stephen Glass

In 1998, Glass was fired from The New Republic after he was caught fabricating sources and entire stories for the magazine. When editors confronted him, Glass enlisted his brother to pose as an executive for Jukt Micronics, a company Glass had made up in one of his stories. Over half of the 41 stories Glass wrote for the magazine were at least partially fabricated. Glass’s fall was eventually made into a movie, “Shattered Glass.”

7. Jack Kelly

Kelly, a foreign correspondent and Pulitzer finalist, resigned from USA TODAY in 2004 after he was caught working with a translator to mislead his editors. The paper’s investigation of his work found at least eight of his major stories to be false, including an account of a “high speed hunt” for Osama bin Laden in 2003.

8. Janet Cooke

Cooke won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 1981 for her Washington Post profile of an 8-year-old heroin addict, “Jimmy’s World.” Jimmy turned out not to exist (although then-D.C. Mayor Marion Barry claimed to have located the child). Cooke admitted making up the story after editors at the Toledo Blade — where Cooke had previously worked — noticed she had inflated her resume.

9. Patricia Smith

Smith, a Boston Globe metro columnist like Barnicle, resigned two months before her co-worker after an editor caught her creating characters in her columns. Smith, who doubles as a spoken-word poet, admitted that four of her columns contained fictional elements and resigned.

10. The New York Sun

The paper with the solar name made up a lunar hoax in 1835 when it ran a series of stories about life on the moon attributed to astronomer John Herschel (who was real). The supposed wonders found on the moon included beavers who walked on two feet and “man-bats.”